john adams by david mccullough book review

(June)įorecast: Joseph Ellis has shown us the Founding Fathers can be bestsellers, and S&S knows it has a winner: first printing is 350,000 copies, and McCullough will go on a 15-city tour both Book-of-the-Month Club and the History Book Club have taken this book as a selection. When in another time and society might be taken as platitudes about public service were to both John and Abigail Adams a lifelong creed (pg. The author is likewise brilliant in portraying Adams's complex relationship with Jefferson, who ousted him from the White House in 1800 and with whom he would share a remarkable death date 26 years later: July 4, 1826, 50 years to the day after the signing of the Declaration. In John Adams, David McCullough summarizes Adams’s character, writing, He was not a man to back down or give up, not one to do anything other than what he saw to be his duty. Helping push through the draft for the Declaration of Independence penned by his longtime friend and frequent rival, Thomas Jefferson, and serving as commissioner to France and envoy to the Court of St. Later on, we see Adams bickering with Tom Paine's plan for government as suggested in Common Sense, McCullough also makes vivid Adams's actions in the second Congress, during which he was the first to propose George Washington to command the new Continental Army. The events McCullough recounts are well-known, but with his astute marshaling of facts, the author surpasses previous biographers in depicting Adams's years at Harvard, his early public life in Boston and his role in the first Continental Congress, where he helped shape the philosophical basis for the Revolution. Left to his own devices, John Adams might have lived out his days as a Massachusetts country lawyer, devoted to his family and friends. With a keen eye for telling detail and a master storyteller's instinct for human interest, McCullough ( Truman Mornings on Horseback) resurrects the great Federalist (1735–1826), revealing in particular his restrained, sometimes off-putting disposition, as well as his political guile. Here a preeminent master of narrative history takes on the most fascinating of our founders to create a benchmark for all Adams biographers.

John adams by david mccullough book review